"There is hardly a case in which the dispute was not caused by a woman"
About this Quote
A line like this lands with the blunt force of a punchline because it pretends to be sociology while performing stand-up misogyny. Juvenal, Rome's great satirist of moral panic, isn’t carefully measuring causality; he’s staging a familiar male fantasy: that social disorder always has a feminine origin story. The phrasing is engineered to sound empirical ("hardly a case") while doing the oldest rhetorical trick in the book - converting prejudice into a rule of nature.
The specific intent is less about women than about men: to give male anxiety a scapegoat with a pulse. In Juvenal’s Rome, the household is political, marriage is economics, and sexual reputation is a public asset. When a satirist blames "a woman" for "the dispute", he collapses messy power struggles (inheritance, patronage, status, violence) into a simpler narrative where female desire is the spark and men are merely flammable. It’s a way to mock a culture that sees itself as rational and disciplined while secretly obsessed with controlling women’s bodies and choices.
The subtext is also self-protective. If conflict can be pinned on women, then male rivalry, corruption, and incompetence become secondary - background noise to the supposedly disruptive force of femininity. Juvenal’s satire thrives on exaggeration, but it’s not harmless exaggeration: it flatters the reader’s sense of superiority while laundering a social order that depends on blaming women for the consequences of male power.
The specific intent is less about women than about men: to give male anxiety a scapegoat with a pulse. In Juvenal’s Rome, the household is political, marriage is economics, and sexual reputation is a public asset. When a satirist blames "a woman" for "the dispute", he collapses messy power struggles (inheritance, patronage, status, violence) into a simpler narrative where female desire is the spark and men are merely flammable. It’s a way to mock a culture that sees itself as rational and disciplined while secretly obsessed with controlling women’s bodies and choices.
The subtext is also self-protective. If conflict can be pinned on women, then male rivalry, corruption, and incompetence become secondary - background noise to the supposedly disruptive force of femininity. Juvenal’s satire thrives on exaggeration, but it’s not harmless exaggeration: it flatters the reader’s sense of superiority while laundering a social order that depends on blaming women for the consequences of male power.
Quote Details
| Topic | Relationship |
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